Dead Drop: August 13

It’s Friday.  It’s the 13th.  What could go wrong?

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY:  The Dead Drop has been warning you to brace yourself for an onslaught of documentaries, news stories, OP-EDs, panel discussions and the like marking the 20^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  The latest contribution to that genre that we have spotted comes from Newsweek which says it is running a series of articles “reconstructing the road to 9/11 as it was constructed 20 years ago, day by day.” They say they will be running daily stories and live tweeting events of the day, minute by minute, starting at 4:45a EST on September 11^th. The series is written by author William Arkin. We haven’t gone through them line-by-line but in the first installment, Arkin says he will be pointing out “panicked overreactions and compounding of errors.” We quickly found some errors in his reporting.  For example, in the first paragraph of a story posted on August 6^th – designed to commemorate the now-famous August 6^th PDB titled “Bin Ladin determined to strike in US,” Arkin says that CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin had drawn the short straw and had the duty of going to Crawford, Texas and briefing President George W. Bush.  This came as news to us – and to McLaughlin. Michael Morell, who was Bush’s PDB briefer at the time explains at length in his book The Great War of Our Time, how that PDB item came to be written and delivered. He writes that the briefing took place in the living room of the president’s ranch and that he delivered it with only one other person besides himself present, Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the NSC.  Who drew the “short straw” is not really that important – but it makes us wonder if Newsweek gets those details wrong – how much stock should we put in the rest of the series?  After all, they have had twenty years to work on it. (Note: Newsweek also changed the original CIA preferred spelling on the PDF of “Bin Ladin” to “Bin Laden” but we’ll forgive them for that.)